


The Precipitation of Matters

by Zabbers



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: M/M, Other, Power Play, The Year That Never Was (Doctor Who), a glass of poison maybe, domination without sex, flashfic, regeneration chicken, regeneration roulette, the Doctor on his knees, the Master’s temper, too filthy to read in class
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-22
Updated: 2019-01-22
Packaged: 2019-10-14 10:04:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17506517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zabbers/pseuds/Zabbers
Summary: An angered Master plays a risky game. The Doctor plays along.





	The Precipitation of Matters

In the glass, it’s a clear, if cloudy liquid. 

The Doctor had watched as the Master crushed the tablets into fine powder in his hand, thumb grinding methodical circles against the pads of his middle and pointer fingers. Pill by pill, they had collapsed under the inexorable pressure into clumps and dustings that he sprinkled into lukewarm water. 

“A painkiller,” he had said, the command dangerously imprecise. The attendant, one the Doctor hadn’t seen before, had returned with a tray--tall glass of water, steaming, tablets bare and unidentifiable on a plate. 

The Master sits at table, preparing the silty suspension. From his accustomed position on his knees, his head below the plane of the table’s surface, the Doctor sees the light refract through the glass, layers of sediment dimming it to the menace of a murky pond. The Master picks up a glass rod and stirs his medicine. The liquid swirls into a narrow, milky vortex. He flicks the tip of the rod, and droplets fly through the air. White grit sticks to the Master’s fingers.

The Doctor can still feel the quickness of the Master’s hand around his throat, the cradle of the curve of his thumb against his larynx, knuckles on the blade of his jaw. He can’t stop thinking about how he had felt his own hips lift to relieve the force around his neck, and how he had resisted it. How after that the Master had let him go. 

But now he puts a hand to the back of the Doctor’s neck. Now he propels him away from the table to a spot of open floor, pristine and smooth and slick with the wax of the morning’s polish. The Doctor scrabbles under the awkward momentum, bruises his knees as always. The Master holds up the glass, still spinning, and waits for it to still.

“Shall we play a game?” he asks. “You’ll like this game.”

The Doctor expects the Master to try to make him drink. He expects the grip on the back of his neck to constrict, and he tenses in anticipation of the brutal touch, tries to prepare for the Master to tilt his head and bring the glass to his mouth, for the glass to jam against his teeth and bruise his lips.

None of this happens. The Master, eyes intent on his, pours the liquid into a slow puddle at his feet. Satisfaction curls the corners of his mouth as he forms the words, disappears again as he speaks them, deliberate, human plosives and vowels. 

“Clean it up,” he says, “--with your tongue.”

For a moment, this is too much. The Doctor wants to make a face at him, to wrinkle his forehead and widen his eyes and screw up his mouth, quizzical and questioning. But he knows it’s the wrong thing to do. 

He doesn’t break away. He meets the Master’s eyes and holds them, shifting as a glacier shifts through careful, long-suffering neutrality to defiance. Refusal. He suppresses the building shiver for an impossibly long time, suffocating it with an outrage to match the Master’s rage. 

_The people of this planet need me_ , he thinks, like a mantra.

The hand on his neck is a vice, but it neither presses him to the floor nor pulls him away from it. The fingers twitch and then still against the ends of his hair. The Master is angry, yes, but some of that anger, the Doctor knows, has gone, sublimated into the thrall of what could happen now. 

He knows because he feels it, too.

Even the Master’s anger, even his own, recedes, will always recede: he does--a shudder--he does _want_ this game, even if he can’t, even if he really can’t like it. 

So the message in the set of his shoulders is clear:

 _Make me_.

Somewhere in a compartment of his mind, the Doctor is aware of the other players in the room: the attendant, the guards, always-present supernumeraries who are there solely to make things worse. He worries that one of them will try to intervene, human empathy overpowering self-preservation to move one of them to act. It’s selfish to wish that they weren’t there at all. But if he could just get the Master alone, if there was no one to lend humiliation to either of them, he knows, he knows he could get through to the Master. Alone with him, a didactic nudge, a few words gone wrong wouldn’t come to this. 

The Doctor swallows. He is a little proud, a little unwilling to submit. He’s used to being stronger, cleverer, faster, winning-er. He’s lived too long in the pup tent, with the dog bowl, on his hands and knees. He isn’t ready to budge or to blink. He’ll fight.

The Master’s jaw tightens. 

He stiffens.

And then he looks away.

The Doctor’s breath catches in his throat. He imagines he can read the pain in the angle of the Master’s head as he lowers it. He almost follows, almost rises to catch the averted eyes, to take the Master’s chin. To say, _I’m here. It's all right. It doesn’t matter._

Instead, he completes that breath. He lists for himself all the innocuous painkillers, alongside the threatening one, and he puts out of mind the awareness of the other eyes in the room, the ones that are still watching him. He bends down as though bowing deeply, the nape of his neck slipping out of the Master’s touch, spine arching, concave, as he takes his weight on his hands and brings his mouth to the floor, to the puddle, to the possible poison pooled at the Master’s feet.

It isn’t obedience, not exactly, this yielding.

The tepid liquid is bitter, one-note, the manufactured flavour dominating the more organic complexity of the water itself and the trace compounds that have been tracked across the floor. The Doctor wills himself to turn off the part of his brain that could analyse what he’s ingesting. He knows the Master won’t let him stop until he’s licked up every drop, not now he’s begun, and it’s useless to think about what’s in it. He allows the stuff to coat his lips. He moves across the floor, chasing a spreading edge to where it’s snuck beneath the sole of the Master’s leather oxford.

The Doctor can see himself in it, forelock damp and drooping, face flushed. Never has a shoe been so shiny. He’s about to stick his tongue under it, clean below and around it, when, abruptly...no. 

He just can’t.

He freezes, and he cranes to look up at the Master, whose eyes are very bright, whose chest is trembling visibly. 

Together, in time, they inhale, they hold their breaths, animals caught in lights. The room holds its breath, everyone holds their breath, the whole world, the whole planet of captive, pawned, witnessing bystanders hold their breath, like all the molecules in all the atmosphere of the Earth are afraid to move. 

Then--the Master snarls, his entire expression transformed, and then there is a hand hard against the Doctor’s back, and then he is prostrate against the Valiant’s deck, bruised by the impact, face wet, face streaming, and it doesn’t matter anymore whether it’s water or poison or tears in his eyes or down his throat, the Master’s hand is on the back of his neck again, tight and rough on his skin, the tip of his shoe pressed close against his mouth.

But the Master, the Master crouches down to him, tugging on his hair to turn his face. The Doctor gulps air, terror let loose now, not entirely in control of his body. And the Master’s whole form is a fist, his entire being is clenched, yet somewhere inside the anger that swept them to this place, the Master is also watching, full of concern, and that Master is wresting this person from himself. The Doctor wants to reach for him--

\--and the Master sits; he pulls the Doctor into his lap. He cushions his head. He wipes the heel of his palm across the Doctor’s dripping cheeks. They wait.

“So which was it?” he asks, his voice hoarse, if disquietingly calm.

The Doctor can’t speak, but he shakes his head, and it isn’t a lie. He’s too far gone to know. He’d told himself not to know.

“Hmm.” The Master contemplates the fingers of his other hand, as though he’s inspecting his nails. He rubs them together. White dust drifts onto the Doctor’s chest.

“Open your mouth.”

Alarm. _No._

“Open. Your mouth.”

The Master pushes his thumb under the Doctor’s lip, rubbing the pad of it against his gums. The Doctor recoils, just short of panic. The Master withdraws his hand and puts it into his own mouth, sucking the last of the crushed drug from his fingers. He anoints the Doctor’s forehead with the chrism of their saliva and smoothes his hair aside. 

Having consecrated their recklessness, he pulls the Doctor close to shift his weight in his arms, stretching out one leg and bending the knee of the other. He gets comfortable. His smile is too bright, beatific, rapt.

“What do you say we find out?”

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by Simm's shiny shoes.


End file.
